


So Nothing's Left Unturned

by ninemoons42



Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Erik is a Big Dorkface, Erik is a Sweetheart, Fluff, Inspired by Music, M/M, Musicians, Performance Art, Singing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-21
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-30 02:14:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1012840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Erik records his latest EP in the most unexpected of spaces: an exhibition room in a museum, surrounded by gigantic canvases. All he has are his voice and his guitar and his guitar case.</p><p>The person he's singing to / for is not here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	So Nothing's Left Unturned

**Author's Note:**

> Idea lifted more or less wholesale from these two Bastille performances [the Acoustic - Live in Paris set]: [Pompeii](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytie995zY-Q) and [Flaws](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3D-B56YgXQ). The latter song also provides the title.
> 
> Thanks to Afrocurl for beta and encouragement.

Standing on the steps outside, Erik was caught up in an impression of sculpted light, brightness given a specific form and then dropped wholesale into place. Rolling hills far away, receding towards the bright blue line of the horizon. Tiny bursts of vibrant flowering and flourishing. He itched for a pen, for a piece of paper, for his guitar - and he’d reach for that last item now, if only Kitty wasn’t polishing it to a high shine.

On the steps stood a friendly-looking docent, tousled and stubbled, and it was almost unforgivably picturesque when a slight breeze started up to whip that young man’s coat hems around his knees.

“Good morning,” he said as Erik and the others approached. Gallic vowels and consonants, resonant rhythm. “I’m Remy. Miss Monet says you’re to go right on in - we’ve got the best room in the house waiting on you.”

Erik smiled at him, shook his hand, and stepped prudently out of the way as Emma started asking questions about audio setup and microphones and _we were promised there’d be no one here, we can’t be disturbed while we’re shooting -_

“If he says everything’s okay,” Erik said after a few moments of Remy’s smile turning respectful and knowledgeable, “then everything’s okay.”

“Everything in the name of doing this right,” Emma said as they were ushered down a bright blue-and-gold carpet.

Erik shrugged, and reached into his pocket for his phone - but his pocket was empty. “Moira,” he said.

“Text Charles later,” she said, briefly keeping pace with him. “Game face first.”

“I hate it when you’re right, and you’re always right,” Erik groused, but with no real heat in the words.

And she seemed to know it because she grinned at him - her own version of what she described as “Erik Lehnsherr’s overly toothy smile, all predator and heat”.

Rachel stepped wordlessly up to him once they were in the large airy room that was the apparent center of the museum. Massive canvases on the walls, brilliant splashes of color against the pristine marble, bright seasons and monumental figures. “That’s not the shirt we agreed on last week,” she said, though she only looked amused.

“Charles sent it on to me at the very last minute.”

She nodded. “It seems to suit you. At the very least, people will ask questions on YouTube.”

“That’s a good thing, apparently,” Erik said as he bent down and let her run her hands through his hair. There wasn’t much tousling she could do with his relatively short hair, close-cropped to show off the curves of his jaw and his skull, but he let her do what she wanted, up to and including patting just a little red onto his cheeks.

“Too casual,” was Emma’s muttered comment as she circled him, Moira on her heels. “What happened to the button-down?”

“Charles has better taste than you when it comes to my closet,” Erik sniped, affectionately. “You’d have me stand here in some kind of approximation of a suit; he’d rather I was comfortable.”

“And provocative,” was the answering sigh, and she motioned at the white shirt, striped at the bottom hems with the seven colors of the rainbow. “But yes. You’re right. That looks better.”

“I’ll tell Charles you said that.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Emma and Moira said, exactly in unison.

A woman in a black suit and bright red boots walked into the room one moment later. She seemed to take in the sunlight and radiate it back out, changed for having known the shades of her skin. “I am Monet St Croix,” she announced. “And I am a big fan of yours, Monsieur Lehnsherr. We’re quite honored to have you performing here.”

“I’m just happy you let me in looking like this,” he said, lightly, motioning at his tattered leather jacket and his brand-new sneakers.

“You do have a certain presence in here, dressed like that in a place like this. We are ready to record when you are ready to sing.”

“We’re not here,” Moira said as she made shooing motions at Rachel, as she waved Kitty over with Erik’s guitar and the case it traveled in, sporting stickers from all over the world. “We’re in the corners and out of sight, so put us all out of your mind.”

Erik nodded. Took a deep breath. There was something about the air in here, suffused with sunlight, that made him think of Charles standing just outside the ornate arch that was one of the entrances into this space.

But Charles was halfway around the world, talking excitedly into his digital recorder as he gathered material for his next book, and Erik would have to get through today if he wanted to fly out and see him.

So he had to sing here, for Charles, before he could see him.

“Good luck,” Kitty whispered as she put the guitar case down on the ground.

“Thank you,” Erik said. “I really - thank you, for working with me.”

“Charles said you were good people.” Her small voice was amplified by the room. “And he’s right. You are. So I’ll do everything I can to help you kick ass, even if it’s just looking after your stuff.”

“That will never just be a _just_ ,” Erik said, as seriously as he could, though he wanted to smile at the earnest look on her face. “You do good work. Important work.” He thought he might have looked as she did, once.

Once, before he’d met the man who’d written the books he’d read all throughout high school, little understanding that the writer had been his age and had been a genius, a prodigy, to begin with.

And he still remembered going to a con, singing a song based on that writer’s books, and getting hug-tackled by that writer, the two of them laughing together already, even before they’d managed to introduce themselves to each other.

Now he was here with his own songs, his own voice, and Charles was not here, but he’d sing for Charles anyway, with his heart in his voice as he’d done with that first song.

St Croix, with Remy standing deferentially behind her, tilted her head at Erik from her seat next to the painting that Erik had decided was his favorite in this room: a turbulent night sky, the stars tossed on a fickle wind, and a silhouette of a tower. “We are ready, monsieur,” she said, “merely waiting on you.”

Erik glanced over his shoulder in time for Moira to count down at him, silently, folding her fingers into her palm and then giving him a double thumbs-up: _You’re live._

He took a deep breath. There was a microphone near his feet. Three cameras pointed at him, a semicircle field of view, and he hoped they could catch the slant of the light, the look in his eyes, because he was going to sing for someone who wasn’t there.

A flash of blonde hair out of the corner of his eye: Emma watching him, steady and steadying regard.

Erik closed his eyes, and began to sing: and as his voice carried up and out into the spaces of the room, skirling around the sunlight that bathed his feet in warmth, he thought of the pen in his hand and the smooth expanse of Charles’s skin beneath the point, freckles against ink, the dark shadows of music and lyrics taking shape and Charles fighting to stay still beneath him, because he was ticklish and he was manfully suppressing the instinct to rear away - he was still, beneath Erik’s hands, a shivering silvery laugh in the scant few spaces between them.

Five songs, enough for an EP. Erik sang, pouring the power of his voice out at the feet of the paintings and their colors. His hands moved lightly on the guitar and his feet beat out his rhythms against the floor, against the guitar case.

A pause. Smiles all around.

Emma stepped forward.

Erik stopped her with a raised hand. “There’s one more.”

“That wasn’t in the plan,” she said.

“Trust me,” he said.

She paused at that, but only for half a second. “Normally I listen to Charles when he says that in connection to you. You are a different story completely, but you get a pass this time.”

“I’d better not blow it, then,” Erik murmured. “Thank you.”

Emma didn’t acknowledge him: the next thing she said, “One more,” was directed to the others.

In his mind’s eye Erik pictured Charles standing next to him, humming quietly and tunelessly along - a not-unpleasant single note, anchoring him.

 _You write the sentences that form me,_ Erik sang: the first line of the sixth song, the bonus song. Hastily written and improvised. He’d had blue on his mind when he wrote this on a scrap of paper that fell apart even as he wrote. Blue ink, and blue like the storming night in the canvas that he was looking at, something very akin to the blue of Charles’s eyes. _Won’t you mind the p’s and q’s? Won’t you cross the i’s and dot the t’s?_

Echoes singing with him, his own voice rebounding from the floor and from the walls, from the dome of the ceiling, and Erik wasn’t smiling when he finished, but his eyes were closed and his heart was somewhere between his throat and the bright colors.


End file.
